OCTOBER 10, 2005

IS LIFE CHEAP OR PRECIOUS?
By Pastor George Van Alstine

If a close family member dies, we mourn the terrible loss, in our hearts crying: “Why, Lord?”

If a neighbor or a friend dies, we may have great sympathy, but we are more philosophical: “It’s sad, but we all have to die sometime.”

When hundreds of people in New Orleans died, we as fellow-Americans identified with their sufferings, while at the same time wondering why so many people built houses in such a vulnerable place.

Now we’re watching television footage of floods in Guatemala where thousands have died, followed by the awful news of tens of thousands of deaths in Pakistan in a major earthquake disaster. We feel we ought to care just as much about each of these deaths . . . . but we don’t, or we can’t, or both. How can we take in a whole world of grief and suffering?

Even more challenging for our Christian faith is this question: Does God care equally for every one of these tragic deaths? From our limited perspective we feel that God cares more about our personal bereavement than about the countless individual family losses in Pakistan. Does he?

There is an interesting proclamation in the Psalms that we often hear quoted at Christian funerals:
“Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.” (Psalm 116:15)
It’s sometimes emphasized that God’s “saints” are the ones whose lives are precious to him, while he may not show the same concern over the death of anyone else. The word “saint” is a New Testament idea that shouldn’t necessarily be read into an Old Testament passage, but the Hebrew word here is the one consistently used in the Old Testament for God’s covenant people. They are the “apple of his eye” (Deuteronomy 32:10), and it might be presumed that he would consider their lives especially precious.

However, a similar Psalms passage sheds another light on this. Psalm 72 is a hymn about God’s intimate concern for those who are poor and needy. God’s “people” are, in fact, identified as “the poor” (verse 2). Because of this intimate connection, he assures them of justice (verse 2), salvation (verse 4), protection (verse 4), and deliverance (verse 12). The climatic statement in this section of the psalm is
“He will redeem their soul from oppression and violence,
And precious is their blood in his sight.” (Verse 14)

So, even though the God of the Bible may seem to value the lives of his chosen people above other lives, his concern really is much more universal than that. And it especially focuses on the weakest and least noticeable among us, the ones we are most likely to overlook—like the poor people of Guatemala and Pakistan.

It’s in the New Testament we learn that “God so loved the world that he sent his only Son” (John 3:16). Jesus was teaching a crowd of mostly poor people, and not just his disciples, when he said
“Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” (Matthew 6:26)
And after his resurrection, Jesus gave his disciples their Great Commission, which was to proclaim God’s love to every living person:
“Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation.” (Mark 16:15)

My response to those who are dying because of disease, natural disasters, warfare, or just plain old age is limited because as a human I can only feel so much, I can only care so much. But God feels and cares infinitely. He has made every person, and he considers every human life precious. It’s hard for me to imagine it, but God knows a poor beggar in a Pakistan village as well as he knows me. And as difficult as it is for me to embrace this fact, he cares as much that the poor beggar died in the recent earthquake as he cared about the death of my son Steve ten years ago.

No life is cheap to our Father God.